1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and article of manufacture for executing initialization code to configure connected devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Host systems in a storage network may communicate with a storage controller through multiple paths. The storage controller may be comprised of separate storage clusters, where each storage cluster is capable of accessing the storage and provide redundancy to access the storage. Hosts may access the attached storage through either cluster. If a storage cluster fails, then the host may failover to using the other storage cluster to access the storage. Further, the clusters may buffer writes to the other cluster in a non-volatile storage (NVS) so that if one cluster fails, recent writes to the storage device are maintained in the NVS of the non-failing cluster. In such dual cluster systems, each cluster must be configured to use the logical devices, e.g., logical subsystems (LSS), configured in the attached storage.
In dual cluster systems, each cluster separately executes initialization code, such as the initial microcode load (IML) to configure the clusters to access connected devices, such as bus interfaces, storage devices, adaptors, etc. Each cluster maintains a separate set of configuration information to use to access the connected devices. If a failure occurs during the configuration and error recovery procedures are not able to recover from the failure to continue with the configuration and initialization, then an administrator may have to manually edit and reconfigure each cluster's settings to return the dual cluster system to a state prior to the start of the failed initialization and configuration.
There is a need in the art for improved techniques to handle a failure during configuration operations.